It’s getting close to Christmas and it’s about time to start thinking about what you’re going to get for those eager grandparents. This year, my parents and my in-laws will be receiving a Grandparent’s Brag Book, essentially a digital photo album in book form.

We all know how grandparents love to whip out photos of their adorable grandkids, so this year, why not make it easy on them? Present them with a fully formed book, chock full of photos of your kids.

Brag Book Cover

Making the Book

The fun part is designing each page. Decide what size you want to print in and then set a number of pages for the book. If you are going to use a printing service, it helps to start out with their dimensions and find out what the minimum number of pages is.

You can make your brag book any way you like. Use photos of your children from the time they were infants, in chronological order, for a full life book. Or, if your children are still babies, you may prefer to do a two page spread for each month of his or her life.

Another idea is to go with themes . . . you know you’ve got tons of messy face photos that could fit under the “Disasters” category! This can be fun if you add some stickers to enhance your theme. You can even set up title pages for each themed section of the brag book, just use tiles from a scrapbooking kit or even type in your own using one of the fun fonts from your computer.

A brag book doesn’t need to have much in the way of journaling. In fact, since the proud grandparents will likely be showing this off to all their friends, it’s often best to keep things fairly simple. A simple handwritten caption is just fine.

Go Digital

This is one time where it really pays to do all your scrapbooking in digital form. That way, you can easily print the pages out or send them to a printer, without the hassle of scanning and trying to get the colors right and getting the high quality necessary to print.

Digital scrapbooking can be fairly quick, especially if you are using just a couple of scrapbooking kits from a site like Digi Scrap Kits. Keep things simple, a background paper or color, a photo or two with frames and a caption. Add in a couple of embellishments and the page is done!

Girly Brag Book Page

Girly Brag Book Page

Papers used in this example are from Scrapbooking Hearts.

Printing Your Brag Book

Once you’ve taken the time to carefully create all those beautiful pages, it’s time to print them in book form. There are a few ways to go about this.

Self-Binding

You can print the pages off yourself, trim them and then punch holes along the edges and use yarn or ribbon to tie them together. This results in a nice homemade look and if you have older kids, they can do this themselves for an extra special gift.

To make a self-bound brag book last longer, try laminating the pages before turning them into a book.

Outsourced Binding

Head to the local Kinko’s or equivelent in your area, with your pages in hand. They’ll be able to put a slightly more professional binding on your scrapbook.  Make sure you ask them to include a clear plastic cover to protect the pages from wear and tear.

Lulu.com

For a truly professional look, check out publish on demand options like Lulu.com. For a fee, you can have your book published, complete with cover art, in real book format. It’s going to be a little more costly, but you’ll be able to present grandparents with a real book, full of photos of their favorite kids on glossy paper.

This is probably the best option if you want to really knock their socks off! Make sure you know the sizes of books that you can publish before you start your work.

A grandparent’s brag book is the perfect gift this Christmas. My own parents live thousands of miles away and have never actually met my sons, so I know they’ll be thrilled to have their very own scrapbook to have on hand anytime anyone asks them about their grandbabies!

Your grandparents will love the photo book you created with us. You can even make custom photo books for other family members as well. Please view our great selection of photo book samples here.

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